Preface

This book would never have been written had I not been honored
with an appointment as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion at
the University of Edinburgh. In casting about me for subjects of
the two courses of ten lectures each for which I thus became
responsible, it seemed to me that the first course might well be
a descriptive one on "Man's Religious Appetites," and the second
a metaphysical one on "Their Satisfaction through Philosophy."
But the unexpected growth of the psychological matter as I came
to write it out has resulted in the second subject being
postponed entirely, and the description of man's religious
constitution now fills the twenty lectures. In Lecture XX I have
suggested rather than stated my own philosophic conclusions, and
the reader who desires immediately to know them should turn to
pages 501-509, and to the "Postscript" of the book. I hope to be
able at some later day to express them in more explicit form.

In my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often
makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however
deep, I have loaded the lectures with concrete examples, and I
have chosen these among the extremer expressions of the religious
temperament. To some readers I may consequently seem, before
they get beyond the middle of the book, to offer a caricature of
the subject. Such convulsions of piety, they will say, are not
sane. If, however, they will have the patience to read to the
end, I believe that this unfavorable impression will disappear;
for I there combine the religious impulses with other principles
of common sense which serve as correctives of exaggeration, and
allow the individual reader to draw as moderate conclusions as he
will.

My thanks for help in writing these lectures are due to Edwin D.
Starbuck, of Stanford University, who made over to me his large
collection of manuscript material; to Henry W. Rankin, of East
Northfield, a friend unseen but proved, to whom I owe precious
information; to Theodore Flournoy, of Geneva, to Canning Schiller
of Oxford, and to my colleague Benjamin Rand, for documents; to
my colleague Dickinson S. Miller, and to my friends, Thomas Wren
Ward, of New York, and Wincenty Lutoslawski, late of Cracow, for
important suggestions and advice. Finally, to conversations with
the lamented Thomas Davidson and to the use of his books, at
Glenmore, above Keene Valley, I owe more obligations than I can
well express.
Harvard University,
March, 1902.